Calveiro told the Post that “nobody talks about” their finances on Instagram.

“It worries me how much I see girls care about image,” she said.

Calveiro added that she had “a lot of opportunities to save.”

“I could’ve invested that money in something,” she said.

Wider repercussions

The quest for that picture-perfect lifestyle isn’t only pushing some Instagram users into debt – it’s also contributing to some broader cultural issues.

The UK-based Royal Society for Public Health recently named Instagram the worst social-media app for mental health. Its study of almost 1,500 Britons aged 14 to 24 found that young people were most likely to associate Instagram with negative mental well-being and feelings of inadequacy and anxiety.

“Social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol and is now so entrenched in the lives of young people that it is no longer possible to ignore it when talking about young people’s mental health issues,” Shirley Cramer, the CEO of the organization, said in a post on its findings.

Instagram isn’t the only thing to blame – the obsession with image existed long before the app exploded in popularity.

But a study published in 2012 by the American Psychological Association that looked at 9 million young adults over 40 years found that millennials cared more than previous generations about money and image.

“The proportion of students who said being wealthy was very important to them increased from 45% for baby boomers (surveyed between 1966 and 1978) to 70% for Generation Xers (surveyed between 1979 and 1999) and 75% for millennials (surveyed between 2000 and 2009),” a press release about the study said.